Space is infinite, it is darkSpace is neutral, it is coldStars occupy minute areas of spaceThey are clustered a few billion hereAnd a few billion thereAs if seeking consolation in numbers

But none of these help you visualize how big space is!

Think of the Earth as a shiny blue marble (standard marbles are 1.25 cm or 1/2" in diameter - smaller than the one in the photo). Below are some approximate comparable scale sizes for objects /distances in our solar system:

The Sun - 1.36 m or 54" - a small weather balloon or large exercise ball

Okay, that was fairly easy. So you might be considering a scale model of the solar system using fruit, vegetables and some odds and ends from a garage sale. Now you need some real estate.

Wait for it! Still using our marble for Earth, the Moon would be 0.75 m or 29" away. Or about an adults' arms length. Below are the approximate distances of things from the Sun using the same scale (I'll give up on Imperial measures here):

Now if you wanted to place these to scale and allow space for the full orbits of all the planets and Pluto (it was demoted to a dwarf planet), the Sun would need to be in Mel Lastman Square in North York at the center of a 28km circle running from Lake Ontario to north of the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill!

Proxima Centauri the nearest star at around 4.2 light years would be 77,000 km away from our marble. On scale, the marble is about 1/5 of the way to the moon!

Betelgeuse a red supergiant about 430 light years away would be 7,883,333 km away. On our scale, that's about 1/8 of the way to Mars at it's closest or about 1/20th the distance to our Sun.

The Milky way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. So our marble is now about 1.8 billion km away or outside the orbit of Saturn.

Galaxies are millions of light years apart, the Local Group of galaxies containing our own Milky Way is about 10 million light years across. On the scale of our marble, the local group only gets us about 1/200th the way to the nearest star! The Universe itself is billions of light years across.

I'll stop now before my head hurts trying to visualize all of this in terms of our little blue marble.

Astronomical distances operate on levels. Just when you think you've gotten used to one of them, you'll see another and be humbled all over again.